Prepare to be captivated by Scott Alexander's thought-provoking essay on the power of charity over absurdity. In this piece, Scott delves into the human inclination to dismiss opposing views as stupid without truly understanding them, and challenges us to embrace charity by assuming that our lack of understanding is a fault of our own reasoning. He argues that by practicing charity, we not only gain a deeper appreciation for the opposing perspectives but also enhance our own learning and growth.

Due to an oversight by the ancient Greeks, there is no Muse of blogging. Denied the ability to begin with a proper Invocation To The Muse, I will compensate with some relatively boring introductions.

The name of this blog is Slate Star Codex. It is almost an anagram of my own name, Scott S Alexander. It is unfortunately missing an “n”, because anagramming is hard. I have placed an extra “n” in the header image, to restore cosmic balance.

This blog does not have a subject, but it has an ethos. That ethos might be summed up as: charity over absurdity.

Absurdity is the natural human tendency to dismiss anything you disagree with as so stupid it doesn’t even deserve consideration. In fact, you are virtuous for not considering it, maybe even heroic! You’re refusing to dignify the evil peddlers of bunkum by acknowledging them as legitimate debate partners.

Charity is the ability to override that response. To assume that if you don’t understand how someone could possibly believe something as stupid as they do, that this is more likely a failure of understanding on your part than a failure of reason on theirs.

There are many things charity is not. Charity is not a fuzzy-headed caricature-pomo attempt to say no one can ever be sure they’re right or wrong about anything. Once you understand the reasons a belief is attractive to someone, you can go ahead and reject it as soundly as you want. Nor is it an obligation to spend time researching every crazy belief that might come your way. Time is valuable, and the less of it you waste on intellectual wild goose chases, the better.

It’s more like Chesterton’s Fence. G.K. Chesterton gave the example of a fence in the middle of nowhere. A traveller comes across it, thinks “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here, it sure was dumb to build one” and so takes it down. She is then gored by an angry bull who was being kept on the other side of the fence.

Chesterton’s point is that “I can’t think of any reason to have a fence out here” is the worst reason to remove a fence. Someone had a reason to put a fence up here, and if you can’t even imagine what it was, it probably means there’s something you’re missing about the situation and that you’re meddling in things you don’t understand. None of this precludes the traveller who knows that this was historically a cattle farming area but is now abandoned – ie the traveller who understands what’s going on – from taking down the fence.

As with fences, so with arguments. If you have no clue how someone could believe something, and so you decide it’s stupid, you are much like Chesterton’s traveler dismissing the fence (and philosophers, like travelers, are at high risk of stumbling across bull.)

I would go further and say that even when charity is uncalled-for, it is advantageous. The most effective way to learn any subject is to try to figure out exactly why a wrong position is wrong. And sometimes even a complete disaster of a theory will have a few salvageable pearls of wisdom that can’t be found anywhere else. The rationalist forum Less Wrong teaches the idea of steelmanning, rebuilding a stupid position into the nearest intelligent position and then seeing what you can learn from it.

So this is the ethos of this blog, and we proceed, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “with malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right.”

YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING WHY I’VE CALLED YOU HERE TODAY

Scott Alexander delves into the historical conspiracy surrounding Abraham Lincoln. Titled "Abraham Lincoln, Ape-Man," Alexander explores the outlandish claim that Lincoln signed a demonic pact with the ghost of Attila the Hun. Drawing from the book "The Copperhead, or, The Secret Political History of our Civil War Unveiled," Alexander brings to light the eccentricities of the book's author, Dr. Fayette Hall, and his wild theories about Lincoln's physical appearance and motivations. 

Away with LiveJournal, and in with a new, sleeker-looking blog. A classier blog. A more mature blog. A blog where we’re not afraid to ask the big questions.

Questions like: did Abraham Lincoln sign a demonic pact with the ghost of Attila the Hun?

We turn to one of my favorite historical books of all time, the late 19th/early 20th century bestseller The Copperhead, or, The Secret Political History of our Civil War Unveiled, Showing The Falsity Of New England. Partizan History, How Abraham Lincoln Came To Be President, The Secret Working And Conspiring Of Those In Power. Motive And Purpose Of Prolonging The War For Four Years. To Be Delivered And Published In A Series Of Four Illustrated Lectures.


You’d expect every line of that to be written in a different ridiculous font, and you’d be right.
The author of let’s-just-call-it-Copperhead was Dr. Fayette Hall (1825 – 1912), a Connecticut dentist, orator, amateur historian, and all-around colorful figure. He starts off by ticking off every box on the Crackpot Index, just in case the fonts didn’t get our attention:

Here we have the desire and sentiment of the New York Press. That any person or speaker who exposes facts, or expresses an opinion at variance with their assumption, arrogance and dictation shall be suppressed by mob violence or any other means necessary to crush out free speech. None but the guilty or cowards fear the truth. Josh Billings said that he cared nothing for lies. It was only the truth that he feared, and we think it is the truth that is most feared by those sycophantic caterers for partisan and party power. I have the right to stand here to-night, alone, as did Bruno or Gallileo [sic] to demonstrate truth, and certainly as much right as the whole world has to perpetrate and perpetuate falsehood.

And what is this truth he must speak?

His admirers would have the world believe that every act of Abraham Lincoln was that emanating from the highest intelligence and honest motives, at which this course of lectures is widely at variance, and would demonstrate that [his] only incentive to any exertion was the superstitious phantasies of a freak, aroused to action by Negro voudooism and spirit mediums.

Okay, back up. Let’s start at the beginning here.

As I am about to describe the characteristics, acts and doings of one of the most prominent characters of the nineteenth century, I will start with a physiological and phrenological description of the man.

[According to a description given by his friend W.H. Herndan in 1865], he was about six feet, four inches high. He was thin, wiry, sinewy, raw-boned; thin through the breast to the back and narrow across the shoulders, inclining to the consumptive in build. His structure was loose and leathery; his body was shrunk and shriveled, having dark skin, dark hair — looking woe struck. When he walked he moved cautiously but firmly, his long arms and hands swung down by his side. He walked with even tread, the inner side of his feet being parallel … undulatory, up and down … His legs and arms were abnormally, unnaturally long, and in undue proportion to the balance of his body.

Swinging, unnaturally long arms. Funny-looking walk. Does that remind you of anything? Oh yes, we’re going there.

Here we have a correct description of Abraham Lincoln’s physical and phrenological organization. We read in the first chapter of Genesis : And God said let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping things, and beasts of the earth after his kind; and it was so; And God said: Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness : So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created him.

Now, according to the description given by two of his most intimate friends and ardent admirers, which did Abraham Lincoln most nearly resemble, the higher and superior form of man, which we are told is the form of Deity, or according to the theory of Darwin and other celebrated scientists, the lower and inferior form of his great congener the ape?

We then get treated to this illustration, possibly my favorite in all of world literature:


As a later, wiser age would one day say – “Checkmate, liberals!”
He continues:

I know of no instance where phrenology is better verified than in the head of Abraham Lincoln, and which although but little more than the world’s representation of the ape-like man, he had enough brains located where, while it saved him from idiocy, left him a freak and gave him the qualification to obtain a position in which the dishonest fanaticism of the time aiding that of low cunning and secret intrigue which carried him to the White House and deluged the land in blood.


Luckily, we as a nation have since moved beyond these sorts of superficial comparisons.
So if Lincoln was such a biological nincompoop, how was he so wildly successful at politics?

I also assert and shall show that nearly every public act of Abraham Lincoln’s so-called statesmanship was but an imitation of some historical barbarian predecessor or by direction of those same barbarian spirits purporting to instruct him through the many mediums whom he employed and consulted the same as the oracles were consulted and obeyed in the days of pagan Greece and Rome.

Are we finally going to get to hear his evidence for this remarkable assertion? No! We get on a tangent about Mary Todd Lincoln:

When Lincoln first made advances to Miss Todd, who was very much his superior in every respect, position, education and culture she coolly snubbed him and said to an acquaintance. Who the devil do you think is after me now? It’s that old long shanks, Lincoln, which remark shows that she was not particularly enamored of him.

Shortly after thus expressing herself she discovered that a voudoo fortune teller had predicted for Lincoln that he was to become President of the United States. Whereupon Miss Todd became the suitor, or at least encouraged him to renew the attempt, when after quite an unpleasant experience she succeeded in becoming his wife.

Courting romance voodoo prophecy blah blah. Let’s get to the part where ghosts make Lincoln president. By page 37, Lincoln has connected with the Laurie family, a group of Washington socialites, and been invited to their seance:

At a spiritual seance, the party workers, spiritualists and abolitionists, were met and Mr. Laurie purported to be entranced and controlled by the spirit of Robert Rantoul of Boston, and then and there under those circumstances Abraham Lincoln was announced and declared by those spiritualists and abolitionists to be the next President of the United States. At that time Horace Greeley was much interested in the spiritualistic theory and I was told had the Fox sisters at his house investigating the subject.

After the spiritualistic performance at the Laurie’s, Mr. Greeley was immediately informed of the result, when he became interested and went to Illinois to see Lincoln, where the arrangements were made, and Horace Greeley was the man who had Abraham Lincoln nominated as the dark horse of the Convention of 1860.”

All right, Lincoln. You’re President. What next?

Lincoln had succeeded to the full promise of the voudoo prediction, when it would be supposed that under our form of government as established by our fathers and the Constitution that his ambition would have been sated. Not so. The President of the United States had established direct communication with the spirit world and his future was to be governed by that source. He had no further use for the Constitution, his inaugural oath, or his obligation to the government and the people. There were greater things yet in store for him. As he had succeeded in obtaining power, why should he not retain it, for a superstitious vain man’s ambition knows no limit. It was through the Lauries that he established communication with the spirits and through them that Attila King of the Huns assured him of regal power and a dictatorship for life.

This is getting way too long for a first blog post. To be continued…

Abraham Lincoln, Ape-Man

Discover the fascinating secret life of Abraham Lincoln in this captivating essay by Scott Alexander. Did you know that Lincoln dabbled in necromancy? Explore the evidence surrounding his involvement in seances and spiritualism during the mid-1800s. From his wife's attendance at seances in the White House's Red Parlor to Lincoln's own skepticism, this article sheds light on his connection to the supernatural. Dive into the controversial accounts and discover how much influence Lincoln's necromancy might have had on history. Prepare to be intrigued by this intriguing aspect of one of America's most revered presidents.

It is quite uncontroversial among historians that Lincoln attempted to summon the dead. The only remaining question is to what degree he succeeded, and to what extent it influenced history.

The mid-1800s were the heyday of Spiritualism, a quasi-religious movement centered around seances summoning the spirits of the dead, who usually manifested through rapping noises or through taking control of the medium’s speech. At the time it was a big deal, drawing in even normally skeptical souls: Wikipedia mentions Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-discovered evolution with Darwin, as a confirmed believer.

And then there was Lincoln. CSICOP is the closest thing to an official voice of skepticism in the United States; their past membership includes such luminaries as Carl Sagan and James Randi. Of Lincoln’s spiritualism, they say:

His wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, attended séances, one even held in the White House’s Red Parlor. Lincoln stumbled upon the session, watching with curiosity. On another occasion, he accompanied Mary to a séance at a private home. The president, however, was a skeptic, and one biographer has suggested that his limited involvement in spiritualism was due to a desire “to protect his gullible wife”

What was this “seance in a private home” that even CSICOP agrees Lincoln attended? No other than the Laurie family mentioned in Fayette Hall’s book! In fact, we have a letter from Jack Laurie, dated 1885, stating that “I have very often seen Mr. Lincoln at my father’s house engaged in attending circles for spiritual phenomena, and generally Mrs. Lincoln was with him.”

So Lincoln very likely attended a seance at the Laurie house. What exactly happened during this event?

Here we begin to get into more controversial territory. For this I turn to the work of former Illinois state historian Jay Monaghan, particularly his 1941 article in Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society “Was Abraham Lincoln Really A Spiritualist?”

Monaghan has eleven sources that purport to describe Lincoln’s necromancy, but he only accepts three of these as conveying credible information about the Laurie seance. One of these is Nettie Colburn Maynard, a different medium who had been attending this seance as a guest rather than as the active participant. A second is Colonel S.P. Kase, who later went to the newspapers with his story. The third is our old friend Dr. Fayette Hall, author of The Copperhead, or, The Secret Political History of our Civil War Unveiled, Showing The Falsity Of New England. Partizan History, How Abraham Lincoln Came To Be President, The Secret Working And Conspiring Of Those In Power. Motive And Purpose Of Prolonging The War For Four Years. To Be Delivered And Published In A Series Of Four Illustrated Lectures.

Why was Hall considered a remotely credible source? Because he had, in fact, spent a lot of the 1860s interviewing mediums and other members of DC’s spiritualist community, and in fact had even talked with President Lincoln about the latter’s spiritual experiences (a talk Monaghan describes as “a personal interview which Dr. Hall did not enjoy”.)

These three sources broadly agree on what happened at the Lauries’ seance, but it is Ms. Maynard who gives the most detailed account and whom I will quote here. This passage is long, but worth it:

It was at this seance that Mrs. Belle Miller gave an example of her power as a “moving medium,” and highly amused and interested us by causing the piano to “waltz around the room,” as was facetiously remarked in several recent newspaper articles. The true statement is as follows: Mrs. Miller played upon the piano (a three-corner grand), and under her influence it “rose and fell,” keeping time to her touch in a perfectly regular manner. Mr. Laurie suggested that, as an added “test” of the invisible power that moved the piano, Mrs. Miller (his daughter) should place her hand on the instrument, standing at arm’s length from it, to show that she was in no wise connected with its movement other than as agent. Mr. Lincoln then placed his hand underneath the piano, at the end nearest Mrs. Miller, who placed her left hand upon his to demonstrate that neither strength nor pressure was used. In this position the piano rose and fell a number of times at her bidding. At Mr. Laurie’s desire the President changed his position to another side, meeting with the same result.

The President, with a quaint smile, said, “I think we can hold down that instrument.” Whereupon he climbed upon it, sitting with his legs dangling over the side, as also did Mr. Somes, S. P. Kase, and a soldier in the uniform of a major (who, if living, will recall the strange scene) from the Army of the Potomac. The piano, notwithstanding this enormous added weight, continued to rise and fall until the sitters were glad “to vacate the premises.” We were convinced that there were no mechanical contrivances to produce the strange result, and Mr. Lincoln expressed himself perfectly satisfied that the motion was caused by some “invisible power;” and when Mr. Somes remarked, “When I have related to my acquaintances, Mr. President, that which I have experienced to-night, they will say, with a knowing look and wise demeanor, ‘You were psychologized, and as a matter of fact (versus fancy) you did not see what you in reality did see.'” Mr. Lincoln quietly replied, “You should bring such person here, and when the piano seems to rise, have him slip his foot under the leg and be convinced (doubtless) by the weight of evidence resting upon his understanding.”

When the laughter caused by this rally had subsided, the President wearily sank into an arm-chair, “the old tired, anxious look returning to his face.” This never-to-be-forgotten incident occurred on the fifth day of February, 1863.

Just to make sure we’re all on the same page here, we have three witnesses all enjoying a personal familiarity with Lincoln, including a colonel of the United States Army, being quoted by the Illinois State Historian as claiming that the President of the United States was flung around a room by ghosts, while seated upon a flying piano. And that this same president then proceeded to make a pun about the situation.


“Pics or it didn’t happen” was a much less useful heuristic in the 19th century.
.
Do things get weirder? Oh yes they do. Directly after this performance, Lincoln gets introduced to Maynard herself, the other medium at the gathering. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the famous Lincoln biographer who wrote Team of Rivals, describes this meeting like so:
Lincoln’s lack of belief did not prevent him from enjoying the evening’s entertainment. Nettie was an accomplished actress, ably mimicking the booming baritone of Daniel Webster or the frail voice of the Indian maiden. She spoke for an hour, channeling one voice and then another as she related historical episodes from the landing of the Pilgrims to the current war. Her oration, which carried a passionate abolitionist message, seemed to S.P. Kase the “grandest” he had ever heard. When the spirits left her, she departed as abruptly as she had arrived. All was silent for a while, then the President turned in his seat, threw his right long leg over the arm of his chair, and exclaimed “Was not this wonderful?” He seemed to have viewed Nettie’s performance with the same pleasure he derived from the the theater.

Nettie herself tells the story somewhat differently:

Mr. and Mrs. Laurie and Mrs. Miller were duly presented. Then I was led forward and presented. He stood before me, tall and kindly, with a smile on his face. Dropping his hand upon my head, he said, in a humorous tone, “so this is our ‘little Nettie’ is it, that we have heard so much about?” I could only smile and say, “Yes, sir,’ like any school girl; when he kindly led me to an ottoman. Sitting down in a chair, the ottoman at his feet, he began asking me questions in a kindly way bout my mediumship; and I think he must have thought me stupid, as my answers were little beyond a “Yes” and “No”. His manner, however, was genial and kind, and it was then suggested we form a circle. He said, “Well, how do you do it?” looking at me. Mr. Laurie came to the rescue, and said we had been accustomed to sit in a circle and join hands; but he did not think it would be necessary in this instance. While he was yet speaking, I lost all consciousness of my surroundings and passed under control.

For more than an hour I was made to talk to him, and I learned from my friends afterward that it was upon matters that he seemed fully to understand, while they comprehended very little until that portion was reached that related to the forthcoming Emancipation Proclamation. He was charged with the utmost solemnity and force of manner not to abate the terms of its issue, and not to delay its enforcement as a law beyond the opening of the year; and he was assured that it was to be the crowning event of his administration and his life; and that while he was being counseled by strong parties to defer the enforcement of it, hoping to supplant it by other measures and to delay action, he must in no wise heed such counsel, but stand firm to his convictions and fearlessly perform the work and full the mission for which he had been raised up by an overruling Providence. Those present declared that they lost sight of the timed girl in the majesty of the utterance, the strength and force of the language, and the importance of that which was conveyed, and seemed to realize that some strong masculine spirit force was giving speech to almost divine commands.

I shall never forget the scene around me when I regained consciousness. I was standing in front of Mr. Lincoln, and he was sitting back in his chair, with his arms folded upon his breast, looking intently at me. I stepped back, naturally confused at the situation – not remembering at once where I was; and glancing around the group, where perfect silence reigned. It took me a moment to remember my whereabouts.

A gentleman present then said in a low tone, “Mr. President, did you notice anything peculiar in the method of address?” Mr. Lincoln raised himself, as if shaking off his spell. He glanced quickly at the full-length portrait of Daniel Webster, that hung above the piano, and replied, ‘Yes, and it is very singular, very!” with a marked emphasis.

S.P. Kase, as quoted in Fayette Hall, describes the scene somewhat differently:

When I entered the parlor, I found the President and Mrs. Lincoln there, together with a number of people whom I did not know. For a while the conversation was general, and nothing unusual happened. Suddenly a young girl [Nettie] walked the length of the drawing room to where President Lincoln sat. Stopping in front of him, the child, for she was nothing more, looked into his eyes with a peculiar rapt expression on her face.

‘President Lincoln,’ she said in a clear, loud voice. ‘The liberty of our nation conceived in the womb of oppression and born in the throes of revolution, can never be crowned with the wreath of immortality, until each and every human being in these United States is free. Slavery in any form must not exist. So says that spiritual Congress, which in this dread time of menace and danger to the Union, watches over and directs the affairs of the nation with even greater care and steadfastness of purpose than do the representatives chosen by the people. I have been chosen as their medium of communication with you. Before you can hope to bring about the great and lasting glory of this republic, you must make every man within its boundaries free. You must emancipate all the slaves by your pen, and your armies must indorse your action with the sword.’

Fayette Hall, who was actually at this same seance himself, concludes his description by saying:

On September 22, 1862 [Lincoln] signed the proclamation, making the slaves free men … As the spirit communicating did not send in his card or announce his name, and the question arose as to who it might be, some one present seeing the portrait of Daniel Webster suggested that it might be his spirit, and it was at once decided that it was…I think it more likely to have been the spirit of the Negro pirate, Wansley, who with the pirate Gibbs, was hanged on gibbet, now Bedloes Island, in New York Bay.”

This is as far as Doris Kearns Goodwin, CSICOP, Colonel Kase, and the rest of the sane historical establishment will allow us to go. It’s pretty far. It at least suggests that the idea of the Emancipation Proclamation was communicated to Lincoln by a ghost. Who may or may not have been a pirate. One of the most important documents in American history was inspired by an ambiguously-piratical ghost. According to a US Colonel.

But Nettie Colburn Maynard, the medium involved, wrote a tell-all autobiography after the war. Some parts of it, like the levitating piano, we can verify through other sources. But Nettie goes further and says that after this event, Lincoln secretly called her to the White House for a sort of 19th century version of Project Stargate, an attempt to see whether Nettie’s powers could be valuable weapons in the Civil War.

There’s no evidence of this beyond Nettie’s own claims. But these should not be dismissed. We know for certain that Mrs. Lincoln believed in Nettie’s powers. And we have good testimony that the President was confronted with the whole piano incident that he could not explain. We know Lincoln was superstitious: he explicitly claimed it (“I was always superstitious” – Lincoln in letter to Joshua Speed), and often spoke of his prophetic dreams. So if you’re superstitious, and you’ve just seen a medium demonstrate seemingly supernatural powers, and you’re fighting a war, why wouldn’t you try to take advantage of this?

Further, Nettie’s book starts with an introduction by the publisher, who says that before he published it he did as much research as possible, first into the character of Ms. Maynard [there follows a long list of respectable judges and writers and such who are quoted as saying they know Ms. Maynard and she is a very honest person who would never lie about this kind of thing] and into corroborating evidence. He then gives sworn affidavits by several Washington politicians and their families (as well as one famous author) who say they were at some of these same seances and everything described is true.

So, what does Nettie describe? First, that a skeptical Lincoln prepares a test for her. He hides one of his friends, General Dan Sickles, whom Nettie has never met, underneath a cloak. Then he asks Nettie to tell him who he is. Nettie channels the spirit of “the princess Pinkie”, who addresses the man as “General” and by the riddle “Crooked Knife”. It is decided that a crooked knife is sufficiently like a sickle to count this as a win, and Nettie gains the President’s trust.


Pictured: an all-knowing voice from beyond the veil of death
.
This incident is apparently on sufficiently firm ground to be included in the popular biography of Daniel Sickles, although I don’t have this book and can’t double-check this. We also have a claim by Mrs. Somes, the wife of a Congressman from Maine at the time, that she discussed this story with General Sickles and that he confirmed it was true.
Around this point, Lincoln orders his friend Isaac Newton (not that Isaac Newton!) to get Nettie a cover as some kind of low-level government worker dealing with agriculture. He then consults her several times during the war, asking her what the spirits recommend he do. In the interest of length I will include only one of these stories, although Nettie’s book is full of them. This description is from Monaghan:

In making a decision of such magnitude [as launching an important military campaign], a man as cautious as Lincoln is known to have been might have consulted every angle of opinion before embarking on the enterprise. Congressman Somes, according to report, was asked to bring Nettie Colburn to the White House for a secret session. “Consider the matter confidential,” Lincoln warned the Congressman.

At the appointed time Mr. Somes and the medium were hurried upstairs to the executive chamber, where Mr. Lincoln and two gentlemen were waiting…Mr. Lincoln then gently stated he wished to give the medium an opportunity to display her rare gift. As the time for the seance approached all sat silently for a few moments and Nettie went under control. She recalled:

“One hour later I became conscious of my surroundings, and was standing by a long table, upon which was a large map of the Southern States. In my hand was a lead pencil…I glanced around to note Mrs. Lincoln quietly conversing in another part of the room. The only remarks I heard were these: “It is astonishing,” said Mr. Lincoln, “how every line she has drawn conforms to the plan agreed upon.” “Yes,” answered the older soldier, “it is very astonishing.” Looking up, they both saw that I was awake, and they instantly stepped back, while Mr. Lincoln took the pencil from my hand and placed a chair for me…

Shortly afterwards, when about leaving, Mr. Lincoln said to us in a low voice, “It is best not to mention this meeting at present.” Assuring him of silence upon the question, we were soon upon our way.”

So what about Attila the Hun?

I have searched far and wide for any evidence that Fayette Hall had a source for this. Hall, who was at some of these seances and obsessively interviewed attendees at others, seems to be infuriatingly able to combine meticulous research with total flights of fancy, and it appears that the Attila claim is one of the latter. As far as I can tell, it just seems to him that Abraham Lincoln’s actions were the sort of thing someone who had signed a demonic pact with Attila the Hun might do.

So in the end, what do we have? Pretty high-quality evidence, evidence good enough to satisfy all of Lincoln’s most famous biographers and historians not to mention frickin’ CSICOP, that Lincoln attended seances. Good evidence that these seances included a piano that was made to appear to levitate, and that Lincoln sat on top of it. Weak but still plausible evidence that Lincoln then, in secret, tried to summon spirits to help him win the Civil War. And, alas, no evidence at all that Attila the Hun was involved in any way.


Except this very suspicious-looking picture plus caption!
.
Not that I believe there were any actual ghosts involved. Levitating pianos and speaking in booming Daniel-Websteresque voices is well within what we know real mediums can do – the former through trickery that was amply revealed by Harry Houdini’s campaign against spiritualism, the latter through some kind of dissociative state that modern psychology doesn’t really understand that well but which is probably also behind things like dissociative identity disorder. I want to think that Ms. Colburn was generally honest but mentally frail and prone to exaggeration, while Ms. Miller, the medium who levitated the piano, was otherwise. But that’s just my personal bias seeping in.
Still, I think this has been a good exercise in charity. We went from something so outrageous that no one could possibly believe it – Fayette Hall’s claim that Lincoln made a demonic pact with Attila the Hun – and through investigating it, discovered something extremely fascinating: that Lincoln attended seances and may even have tested spiritualism as a possible intelligence source during the war. Sure, the original claim may have been false. But looking into it was sure a heck of a lot more fun then “Ghosts don’t exist, you’re all idiots, shut up and go away.”

Abraham Lincoln, Necromancer

Scott Alexander delves into the world of papal betting markets, exploring the complexities of predicting the next Pope. From the US government's ban on prediction markets to the Vatican's historical stance, the author explores the risks and rewards of these unconventional bets. With odds on candidates as diverse as Richard Dawkins, Bono, and even Father Dougal Maguire, readers will be captivated by the author's quest to find a surefire money-making opportunity in this ecclesiastical gambling world.

The good news is that there are some opportunities to make a couple bucks arbitraging papal candidates on InTrade. The bad news is that if you try this, you will be arrested, then damned to eternal hellfire.

The arrests will come from the US government, who continue to ban prediction markets in order to, according to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, “protect market integrity”. To me this sort of seems like a case of locking the barn door after the horse has fled, traveled to Boston, been accepted to MIT, earned a degree in high energy physics, constructed a revolutionary FTL drive, and warped to the outer fringes of the Andromeda Galaxy – but such is the noble and impartial majesty of the law.

The damnations will come from the Vatican. In 1591, Pope Gregory XIV issued a papal bull banned all betting on papal elections under pain of excommunication. This has never really been enforced, but as far as I know it’s still in effect.

Luckily not everyone is afraid of Pope Gregory, and the Papal betting markets continue to function. As one would expect of something at the intersection of Catholicism and gambling, the most significant are in Ireland, especially at paddypower.com, which is offering odds on candidates as unlikely as Richard Dawkins, Bono, and Father Dougal Maguire – who, as you may recall, is fictional.

PaddyPower is also significant for their special bonus offer to refund all losing bets if the next Pope is black. There’s about a 1/3 chance this will be the case – two black cardinals are considered likely candidates – which means it should in theory be possible to come out ahead on net by betting on the leading white guy.

I can think of more complicated plans to get guaranteed free money by getting several people together to bet on all the leading white guys, plus hedging against InTrade’s market that the next Pope will be African, but the maximum refundable bet on PaddyPower is 25 pounds, making this more trouble than it’s worth, which I guess is what the betting markets are counting on.

Another so-close-yet-so-far route to free money is betting on the next Pope’s name. PaddyPower gives even odds in favor of the next Pope’s name being Pope Peter II, which is of course ridiculous. Unfortunately, I don’t see any way to bet against this proposition, which is probably by design.

If InTrade set up a next papal name betting market, that would allow much better calculation of these Peter II odds. Unfortunately, as an American I can’t easily bet in InTrade, and the only person I know who’s done the necessary paperwork to avoid the civil authorities, Leah, is also the only person I know who will be genuinely deterred by Pope Gregory XIV’s papal bull.

I continue to think there ought to be some way to money-pump this “next Pope” thing, but I can’t figure out what it is.

YOU CANNOT SERVE BOTH GOD AND MAMMON, BUT YOU CAN SERVE MAMMON BY PREDICTING WHO WILL SERVE GOD

Scott Alexander debunks the notion that correlation implies causation using Google Correlate. With examples ranging from skiing to heart attacks, Alexander shows how seemingly random search term correlations may not have any meaningful connection. But it's the bizarre results that pique our curiosity, like the correlation between heart attacks and pink lace dresses. What's truly fascinating is how this artifact of Google's vast search database can lead to confounding and misleading associations, raising questions about the reliability of correlational research. Prepare to have your assumptions challenged as you delve into this intriguing exploration of failed statistical correlations.

I need something sexy, something to lure new readers to this new blog and get them excited. So let’s talk about statistical correlations. No, wait, failed statistical correlations!

other search terms they’re correlated with.Google Correlate is a nifty new Google product that takes data sets and finds search terms that correlate with them. For example, if you set it to “correlate over time” and enter a data set of average US temperature, it might return the search term “skiing”, because people are most likely to ski when it’s cold and so searches for skiing will be correlated with temperature. You can also just enter in Google search termsand see what

The results seem to fall into two categories: obvious and nonsensical.

Ones with clear time patterns are obvious. If you enter in skiing, you’ll get “how to ski”, “buy skis”, “snowboarding”, “ski resorts”, and the like. If you enter in a news trend that was only popular at one point, you’ll get both related terms and other news trends only popular at that one point – for example, “school shooting” brings up “jan berenstain”, not because the Berenstain Bears books secretly cause school shootings (…one hopes)but because she died the same week as a relatively big one and so people were searching them around the same time.

Things that don’t have obvious time patterns seem to bring up results that are both nonsensical and very-very convincing-looking. The worst are diseases.

This is Google Correlate’s result for heart attack. It matches it to “pink lace dress” with a correlation of .88 (for comparison, a study comparing cigarette use vs. lung cancer rates across different social groups found a correlation of .71).



Figure 1: Correlation between interest in heart attacks and in pink lace dresses, by time.

As far as I can tell, this is just an artifact of Google having lots and lots of search terms and you would expect some of them to be heavily correlated by mere coincidence.

Google also has a correlate-by-state feature. This one has even weirder results for heart attack, like “can you get a” and “is it a” (note that these are the entire search terms). I understand that “is it a heart attack” is a reasonable question, but I don’t understand who would just enter that phrase into Google and hope it would figure it out. I’m kind of imagining someone having a heart attack going on Google,typing as far as “is it a…” and then falling over dead, but I assume the real explanation is more prosaic, like someone expecting autocomplete to work but being disappointed.

Google’s state-by-state feature seemed potentially really exciting to me. I wrote a while back on the effect of parasite load, and I had the dataset lying around with different states ranked on different metrics. I entered the data for parasite load and got the following search terms: “Toy Johnson”, “Bernie Mac”, “booty models”, “Harvey suits”, “Beyonce clothing line”.



Figure 2: Correlation between parasite prevalence and interest in booty models, by state.

I didn’t actually know what most of these were (I kinda thought Bernie Mac was a real estate conglomerate, which turns out to be false) but upon closer investigation they are all black people or Stuff Black People Like. So I think what’s happening here is that the high-parasite load states are all in the South and relatively poor with low access to health care, which also selects for black people. This obviously has significantimplications for the study’s attempt to determine that high parasite load causes certain social trends.

My next thought was “if I multiply this data set by negative one, I will have an objective pipeline to figuring out Stuff White People Like. That sounds interesting.” So I tried it, and my results were: “black albino”, “shake that eminem”, “tony hawk pro skater”, and “green day time of your life”. I was sort of hoping that “Black Albino” was the name of a band or something (it would actually be a prettygood one) but no, it turns out white people are just fascinated with the idea of black albinos. White people are kind of weird.



Figure 3: A black albino. Happy now, white people?

But let’s keep going through the state-by-state data set. My next Big Social Statistic was “importance of family ties, by state”. States with higher family ties were more likely to search for: “how to swim”, “composition book”, “noni juice”, “muscle men”, “girl kiss”, “Toyota Tacoma 2008”.



Figure 4: Correlation between strength of family ties and interest in swimming, by state.

A lot of these seem related to physical fitness, or ruggedness (the Tacoma seems to be a very sporty, rugged car), or masculinity. I’m not really sure what to make of this.

The last Social Science Statistic in the dataset was Religiosity, which correlated with the following search terms: “Christmas themes”, “rotary cutter”, “Honda rebel 250”. Christmas themes seems sort of plausible. I dunno about the rest.

So as far as I can tell Google Correlate is not very interesting. It doesn’t reveal any deep connections between concepts, or even guess what concept my dataset came from to begin with. For something potentially so powerful this is disappointing.

I can think of two possible uses for it. The first is as a sanity check to make sure your data aren’t completely confounded. If you think you’re measuring average number of roof tiles per house or something, and your data’s Google Correlate results come back with Toy Johnson and Beyonce clothing, you’re probably just measuring race and for some reason different races have different numbers of roof tiles on their houses. Which means ifyou think you’ve found a correlation between roof tiles and something fascinating like voting record, you’re probably just being confounded by race. This is a real problem in a lot of studies.

The second is as a cheap hack for creating datasets. I entered “Jesus” in and got a state by state list of who searched for Jesus. It looked a lot like my state-by-state map of religiousity. The correlates were all things like “Apostle”, “Paul”, “preaching”, and for some reason “Abednego”, who is a very minor Biblical character who has no business being in the top ten correlates of Jesus at all. If you wanted to make a cheap map of state-religiosity in orderto correlate to parasite load or whatever, Google Trends seems like a plausible method.

On the other hand, I tried to see if I could recreate their state map of parasite load. I asked it to correlate “metronidazole”, a medication commonly used in the treatment of parasitic diseases, on the grounds that people with parasites would be prescribed metronidazole and then look it up to see if it was safe. The result looked only a little like my map of state-by-state parasite data, and the number one correlated searchterm (r = .89) was “Is Lil’ Wayne gay?”



Figure 5: Correlation between curiosity over Lil’ Wayne’s sexual orientation and interest in the anti-parasitic medication metronidazole. Whatever my case was, I hereby rest it.

So if nothing else, this exercise has proven my suspicion that the sort of people who worry about whether Lil’ Wayne is gay are, in fact, crawling with parasites.

Google Correlate does not imply Google Causation

Explore the intriguing truth behind the claims about the problems with medical studies in Scott Alexander's latest article. While 90% of medical research being wrong may be a misleading headline, Alexander dives into the complexities and nuances of the issue. Discover the statistical misunderstandings, publication bias, and methodological flaws that contribute to the perceived problem. Gain a deeper understanding of how our current medical research landscape functions, challenge assumptions, and explore potential solutions in this thought-provoking piece.

90% OF ALL CLAIMS ABOUT THE PROBLEMS WITH MEDICAL STUDIES ARE WRONG

Scott Alexander delves into the concept of gender identity, challenging conventional assumptions and exploring the individual experiences that shape our understanding of it. Drawing on personal experiences and conversations with others, Alexander navigates through the complexities of gender identity and highlights the importance of empathy and understanding in tackling societal stigmas. Engaging with neurological and psychological perspectives, this thought-provoking essay invites readers to question their own perceptions and broaden their perspectives on the diverse nature of gender identity. Prepare to have your preconceived notions challenged in this enlightening exploration.

Ozy Frantz introduced zirself to me by saying that “I major in gender studies, but I am not that kind of gender studies student. Promise.” So far this claim has been entirely borne out and Ozy’s blog is actually really good. I still usually avoid reading it, because even a good blog on gender has to be responding to and referencing the bad blogs on gender, and even short little quotes from them make me want to smash something and that something is often someone’s skull. But it really is actually really good.

I am particularly intrigued by the latest post, Cis By Default, which is related to a conversation we had last week. Ozy thinks that some people have really strong gender identity, and other people don’t really have any gender identity at all and just sort of end up not trans-gender because why bother with the social stigma and aggravation that produces?

This neatly combines two of my favorite hammers (in the sense of “…every problem starts looking like a nail”), the idea of individual mental differences and the Principle of Charity.

It also helps explain my own personal experience. I am probably one of the people Ozy calls “cis by default”. I obviously can’t be sure, but I feel like if I woke up tomorrow magically transformed into a (hetero) woman, my first two thoughts (after “WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON???”, of course) would be “Huh, cool, this probably makes it much easier to find a mate” and “Darnit, now I’ve got to deal with this whole menstruation thing”.

[EDIT: Girlfriend just asked me “Wait, if you woke up magically transformed into a heterosexual woman, your first thought wouldn’t be about having to break up with me?” Awwwwwkward.]

And then I’d get into some very rational comparisons to my personality, like “Oh, good, this socially legitimizes my lack of interest in sports”, or “Nice, now it’s attractive for me to project my standard vibe of passive lack of interest in my surroundings, instead of having to try to appear dominant and take-charge all the time.” But I don’t envision any kind of visceral “But oh no I feel truly male this is an offense against the natural order of things!” being anywhere up there.

And as Ozy predicted, this did make me – if not actively prejudiced against, at least confused by trans people for a long time. My thought processes were something like “Gender seems pretty irrelevant, so I wonder why they’re going to so much trouble over this.” And I was actually rounding off to my own experience – maybe these were men who weren’t aggressive or interested in sports, and so they decided that they should become women. Which was kind of dumb. Which was more or less my opinion of trans until I was, I dunno, twenty or so.

What changed my mind was a sort of complicated string of medical facts.

First I learned about phantom limb sensations. These aren’t exactly rare or controversial; over half of amputees have them. The theory is that the brain has a map of how the body should look which does not always correspond to how the body does look. This map isn’t even necessarily based on pre-amputation sensations. Some people born without limbs still have phantom limbs. In another case reported by Ramachandran, a woman whose hand had been deformed from birth needed an amputation; she reported the resulting phantom limb was non-deformed. All these suggest that the brain’s map is at least partially hard-wired rather than based solely on experience.

Later I learned about the exact opposite phenomenon, body integrity identity disorder, where a healthy person with four healthy limbs feels like one of their limbs is “wrong” and has a strong desire to get it amputated. This was originally classified as a psychiatric disease and even dismissed as a subset of amputee fetishism, and to my disappointment Wikipedia still mostly treats it along these lines.

But I’ve heard that some of the same neurologists working with phantom limbs think this is also a disorder of brain-body mapping; that for some reason their brain’s map of their body doesn’t include a perfectly healthy limb and so it feels foreign. Some very preliminary MRI studies seem to have borne this out, and there are other signs that there’s something biological going on too (the limb involved seems to be disproportionately associated with the nondominant hemisphere of the brain).

More convincing to me is that the disorder has a very non-psychiatric resolution: if patients are able to amputate the offending limb, they are perfectly happy and never have any further complaints. Compare this to a more psychiatric population like hypochondriacs, who if you treat one of their fake sicknesses just come up with another, because the underlying psychological problem that makes them want to feel sick hasn’t gone away. After hearing this story I decided to count the previous dismissal/marginalization of these people as a huge failure of psychiatry and as exactly the sort of thing I need to watch out for.

And this segued nicely into stories of people who believed that some of their gendered body parts (breasts, genitals) are wrong and not really part of their bodies. It has all the features that gave body integrity identity disorder a red flag for being organic rather than psychiatric: very strong desire to remove offending body parts, different distribution of comorbidities you see with a lot of genuine psychiatric disorders, and removal of the offending body part makes the person pretty happy. It seems that the same logic that says BIID sufferers may have a map of their body that doesn’t include their left leg or whatever could give these people a map of their body that doesn’t include their penis or their breasts or something.

Of course not all transgender people have this kind of very medical-seeming aversion to a specific body part. But the medical-aversion type of people often also have the typical transgender “I feel my gender identity is wrong” belief, and it would make sense that if some sort of “gender” variable got switched somehow this could produce a gender-inappropriate body map. The existence of gender-inappropriate body maps, and of this whole literature of people’s brains sometimes telling them things about their bodies that aren’t true and then it causes great distress, makes the idea of an isolated gender-variable switch much more plausible.

And if it’s possible to have a gender variable get switched, then it’s much more parsimonious to believe that the people who say they feel like their gender variable is switched actually have this gender variable switched, rather than that they’re acting out for some sort of weird social reason. Especially if it’s hard to think up a weird social reason that would be worth it.

Caring about gender still doesn’t make internal subjective psychological sense to me, any more than having some kind of mental “pants type” variable that says I should be wearing blue jeans and gets deeply distressed whenever I wear khakis.

Then again, I naively picture my body map as being such that, if I got a third arm for some reason, I’d just shrug and see if I could leverage it into a career as a the most confusing basketball player ever, instead of desperately wanting it amputated. So maybe my naive predictions about what variables do and don’t matter to my brain aren’t very good.

So I have two hypotheses. One is Ozy’s hypothesis that some people have gender identity and others don’t, and for some people that gender identity matches their biological sex and for others it doesn’t. A second hypothesis is that everyone has gender identity, but if it matches your biological sex it’s impossible to notice (just like the analogy where fish don’t understand the idea of water) and if it doesn’t match your biological sex it becomes obvious (just as a fish would no doubt notice being taken out of water).

It sounds like the best way to distinguish between the two of these would be to check for cis- people with strong gender identities. Do any of you cis- people out there have a strong, visceral feeling of “Oh, thank God I was born a man/woman, because that’s just obviously what I ought to be – and if I magically transformed into a woman/man, I would want to get surgery/hormones/etc to change back as soon as possible” or something like that?

TYPICAL MIND AND GENDER IDENTITY

Join Scott Alexander as he delves into the unsatisfying way geek culture has co-opted H.P. Lovecraft. Alexander uncovers how humor, or the lack thereof, played a pivotal role in Lovecraft's writings and examines the implications of blending Lovecraftian themes with comedic elements. With thought-provoking analysis and excerpts from Lovecraft's works, this essay provokes readers to question the impact of cultural appropriation on literary legacies. Dive into this exploration of Lovecraft's true intentions and the consequences of misinterpreting his artistic vision. Prepare to have your perspective on Lovecraft forever changed.

A couple days ago, some friends of mine who name-drop Cthulhu all the time admitted they had never actually read any Lovecraft. Further investigation revealed this was actually a common thread among loads of people who play Call of Cthulhu RPG, or describe various buildings or institutions as Lovecraftian, or use “Oh my Cthulhu!” as an atheist substitute for “Oh my God”.

I know it sounds like the height of pretention, but I’m going to come out and say it anyway: I am kind of unsatisfied with what geek culture has done to Lovecraft.

Hello Cthulhu was funny for a few minutes. The Campus Crusade for Cthulhu might be amusing if you’ve had too many dealings with their more wholesome counterpart. Shoggoth on the Roof continues to be one of the most hilarious musicals I have never quite managed to make it to a real showing of (my two favorite songs are Tentacles and To Life.)

And yet.

Lovecraft himself did have a sense of humor, and his biography of Ibid continues to be one of our most important resources on the subject. But I have never seen any signs that he ever decided to mix any trace of humor into his dealing with the Elder Gods or the fantasy worlds he created. I don’t think that was just a lack of sufficient creativity. I think that was a deliberate part of his artistic impulse, at the heart of what he was trying to say.

Here is a passage from The Silver Key. It is long, but I have shortened it as much as I dared, and indeed you would do far better to read the much longer original. Nevertheless, here is the passage. All emphasis is my own:

When Randolph Carter was thirty he lost the key of the gate of dreams. Prior to that time he had made up for the prosiness of life by nightly excursions to strange and ancient cities beyond space, and lovely, unbelievable garden lands across ethereal seas; but as middle age hardened upon him he felt those liberties slipping away little by little, until at last he was cut off altogether. No more could his galleys sailup the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran, or his elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled, where forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon […]

So Carter had tried to do as others did, and pretended that the common events and emotions of earthy minds were more important than the fantasies of rare and delicate souls. He did not dissent when they told him that the animal pain of a stuck pig or dyspeptic ploughman in real life is a greater thing than the peerless beauty of Narath with its hundred carven gates and domes of chalcedony, which he dimlyremembered from his dreams; and under their guidance he cultivated a painstaking sense of pity and tragedy.

Once in a while, though, he could not help seeing how shallow, fickle, and meaningless all human aspirations are, and how emptily our real impulses contrast with those pompous ideals we profess to hold. Then he would have recourse to the polite laughter they had taught him to use against the extravagance and artificiality of dreams; for he saw that the daily life of our world is every inch as extravagant and artificial, and far less worthy of respect because of its poverty in beauty and its silly reluctance to admit its own lack of reason and purpose. In this way he became a kind of humorist, for he did not see that even humour is empty in a mindless universe devoid of any true standard of consistency or inconsistency […] Having lost [their] artificial settings, [people’s] lives grow void of direction and dramatic interest; till at length they strive to drown their ennui in bustle and pretended usefulness, noise and excitement, barbaric display and animal sensation. When these things pall, disappoint, or grew nauseous through revulsion, they cultivate irony and bitterness, and find fault with the social order […]

Then he began once more the writing of books, which he had left off when dreams first failed him. But here, too, was there no satisfaction or fulfillment; for the touch of earth was upon his mind, and he could not think of lovely things as he had done of yore. Ironic humor dragged down all the twilight minarets he rearedThey were very graceful novels, in which he urbanely laughed at the dreams he lightly sketched; but he saw that their sophistication had sapped all their life away., and the earthy fear of improbability blasted all the delicate and amazing flowers in his faery gardens. The convention of assumed pity spilt mawkishness on his characters, while the myth of an important reality and significant human events and emotions debased all his high fantasy into thin-veiled allegory and cheap social satire. His new novels were successful as his old ones had never been; and because he knew how empty they must be toplease an empty herd, he burned them and ceased his writing.

Lovecraft was not opposed to humor, but I think he was opposed to ironic humor, opposed to the kind of humor that takes something titanic and magnificent and then sticks it in the middle of the mundane world so we can all laugh at how it’s not really that much beyond us after all.

And I am pretty sure that putting Cthulhu into Hello Kitty cartoons qualifies.

I think Lovecraft’s artistic philosophy was to come up with something so far beyond normal human experience, so intensely appealing to our wilder and more celestial tendencies and so completely unrelated to our normal base emotions, that even people not quite as sensitive as he was could feel a glimpse of this transcendent otherness.

Although some people classify Lovecraft as a horror writer, I think this misses his essence – there is nothing horrible about The Silver Key, and Randolph Carter, the character most closely corresponding to Lovecraft himself, usually comes out of his encounters with the Beyond better than he went into them. Lovecraft is a writer of the strange, intense, and unearthly. Horror is one of the feelings that can be intense, but so is wonder.

Lovecraft’s aim in creating Cthulhu – and all the rest, because in Actual Lovecraft (as opposed to Pop Lovecraft) Cthulhu is a relatively minor character – was to give us something completely divorced from our normal world where the aesthetic senses could wander free from their usual pollution by the everyday world of politics, commercialism, and status-seeking.

And so of course we immediately turn Cthulhu into a presidential candidate, a clothing line, and a meme, respectively, just to spit in his face.

I should clarify that “just to spit in his face” thing. I don’t think people literally did this to anger Lovecraft’s ghost, since that sounds like the worst ideaobviously should never be joked about, and therefore incessantly is.. But I do think that the more inappropriate a subject is for humor, the more distressing and contradictory to its nature it would be to turn it into a joke, the more humorous it is likely to be. The existence of an entire canon of dead baby jokes is a good example of this. The continuing popularity of racist jokes, which as far as I can tell greatly exceeds the continued popularity of actualnon-joke racism, is another. Lovecraft is much like racism and dead babies in that it is something that

But the situation with Lovecraft is kind of worse than the other two. People who tell dead baby jokes are at least aware that real babies sometimes actually die and that this is very sad. People who tell racist jokes are usually entirely aware of and sometimes even believe in the anti-racism movement, and if not they at least know there exist real black people out there somewhere and that they’re not just this mysterious vague concept that serves as a useful butt for jokes.

Yet so many of the people who make fun of Cthulhu have never read the Dream-Quest, never climbed Ngranek in their imagination or visualized gorgeous minaret-studded Celephais with its sky-bound galleys, never shrank in terror from the High-Priest-Not-To-Be-Described.

And if that’s what people want, fine. I won’t deny that a lot of Lovecraftian humor is pretty funny.

But if you think Cthulhu’s interesting, and if you’re also the sort of person who longs for the fantastic and otherworldly, if there’s anything poetic or romantic in you, I urge you not to limit your Lovecraft knowledge to Call of Cthulhu RPG and to take a look at some of his more serious works. I most highly recommend The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, which like all Lovecraft is freely available online should only take two or three hours if you’re a fast reader. But if that sounds like too much for you, there are excellent short stories in the Dream Cycle like The White Ship that shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.

I LIKED LOVECRAFT COUNTLESS PRIMAEVAL AEONS BEFORE IT WAS COOL


Scott Alexander dives into the uncertainty and anxiety he faces as he awaits the results of his second attempt to secure a US residency after graduating from an Irish medical school. With a haunting fear of failure, he contemplates the possibility of his medical degree being rendered useless and feeling lost in his career prospects. Alexander explores potential backup plans, including working for ambitious startups and considering positions at organizations like MIRI. Join him on this rollercoaster of emotions and self-reflection as he grapples with the future and the omnipresent question of "what now?"

Those of you who know me in real life know that I graduated from an Irish medical school  last year but wasn’t able to get a US residency (ie entry-level doctor job) at the time.

This year I’m trying again. I’ll hear back from hospitals in mid-March. I think I have a good chance.

But a good chance is not a perfect chance. And a non-perfect chance means there is some chance of failure. And this is utterly terrifying to me, to the point where I’m literally having nightmares about it and going a little bit off the wall.

The problem is that these job opportunities only come around once a year, and that if I fail a second time there’s not a lot of reason to think I’d do any better next year. In fact, there are a lot of reasons to think I wouldn’t; hospitals are usually less willing to accept people the longer they’ve been away from medical school, and they’re usually less willing to evaluate people they’ve already evaluated beforeand rejected. And there aren’t that many hospitals offering residencies.

So if I don’t get a job this time, I’m going to have to seriously consider the possibility that four years and thousands of dollars worth of medical school were a total loss career-wise and that I’m going to have to do something else. And I have degrees in philosophy and psychology and not a whole lot of obvious marketable skills. I will be totally back at square one with no idea of what todo with my life.

The rest of this entry is really emo and privileged and people who are actually having serious life crises will find it enraging, so if that’s you please don’t read it.

I am very lucky and grateful to have amazingly generous and far-sighted parents and grandparents who among many other things gave me saving bonds every birthday as a child which have since spent twenty-five years maturing. As a result, I don’t have the problems with medical school loans that you were probably expecting this post to be about, and I have enough money to live comfortably for some time period greater than a year andless than forever. So there will be no immediate crisis. I even have enough money (and/or loan-take-out-ability) to go back to school if I need to. But there is a definite long term “I should probably get a career path or something”.

And since I expect my mental state to be way too shattered to do any kind of planning or decision-making if I do get rejected, I figure I should figure out a backup plan now while I’m still sane so I can carry it out on autopilot if worst comes to worst.

I love working for MetaMed, but they are a very ambitious startup and it seems unwise to bank my entire ability to survive or ever have a career on them sticking around. Besides, just in case they get tired of me accidentally misrepresenting their positions or projecting general cluelessness at them, I should try not to have all my eggs in one basket. MetaMed has thus far not had more work for me than I can do in free time between other obligations, so “continue working for MetaMed but figure out something else to do full time” seems like an obvious best strategy.

It would be nice to work for MIRI in some way. I have a lot of friends who have positions sifting through academic literature for them, and it seems possible I could get something like this if I begged hard enough. But this seems a lot like MetaMed in being a good part-time addition to my workload and not a stable long-term career plan. Harder to explain but more importantly, I think a lot ofmy sense of “I am useful to people and not just a parasite on the world” would come from being able to donate some of what I made to charity, and if I’m taking my money from what is possibly the most efficient charity already this becomes kind of a farce. Probably also a “good if it works, but do in between something else” option.

I would really like something where my MD is not completely irrelevant. Glibly dismissing “sunk cost fallacy” ignores the likely fragility of my mental state and the fact that my parents and family are also going to feel much better if all the work they put into helping me through medical school isn’t just tossed aside. I have heard that many MDs go on to do a Masters in Public Health. This seems to beonly a one to two year course, which is at least a heck of a lot better than having to spend another four years in school. Problem is, I have no idea what a Master of Public Health does, and whether there are likely to be any jobs in it. Anyone here have any experience in that area?

I feel overprivileged just writing this, but I could always just take the LSAT. I’ve been told that lawyers with MDs can get cushy positions in medical law, and although this sort of offends my sense of ethics and not-being-parasitic, a sufficiently good job could give me enough money to donate to charity to make up for that. I know it’s hard for lawyers to find jobs nowadays, but I’ve heard if you go toa good enough law school it’s still not so bad. I could plausibly hope for exceptional LSAT scores – I got a perfect score on the SAT verbal which I hear is similar – so that plus my MD might be enough to get me in somewhere really good. Then again, it’s another four years of very expensive education once again without a guaranteed job at the end of it.

I’ve heard another route some MDs go if they can’t get into clinical medicine is getting an MBA and going into some form of medical business. The fact that I have no idea what forms of medical business exist seems to put me at a disadvantage compared to people who have been wanting to do this their whole lives, plus I think everyone who knows me agrees I would be the worst businessman ever (“Honestly,as far as I can tell the evidence for our product working isn’t that robust, and I’m not sure it meets your particular needs anyway”). This is also one where I’m concerned about whether I would have a good shot at a job at the end of it. Getting business jobs seems to require networking and self-selling and self-confidence other things I am totally unable to do.

I really like biostatistics. I just happen to be really, really bad at it. I can fake writing about them pretty well, but in terms of actual number crunching they sort of slip out of my mental grasp just like all other math. I’m not sure whether going back to school to become a statistician would force me to learn it, or just end up with me failing out of school and being even worseoff than I started. Also, once again I really don’t know anything about the state of the job market here.

That leaves non-medical jobs. Mike Blume pushes his idea of “learn programming on your own and make money as a programmer”, and I have to admit it worked for him and that programming strikes me as an extremely honest job with good working conditions. On the other hand,  I don’t know if companies actually give programming jobs to people with no experience beyond independent study, and I don’t know if I could actually teach myselfprogramming. People say that programming is easy and any smart person can learn to do it, but these same people also tend to say that math is easy and any smart person can learn to do it, which makes me think either they’re just wrong or that I don’t qualify for the current definition of “smart person”.

I’ve always sort of wanted to be a teacher, and it’s a decent-paying, decent-status, not-*too*-unethical job. The fields that I would probably be really good at teaching (history, English, etc) are totally jobless, but I’ve heard there’s a big demand for math teachers. I’m bad at math compared to genuine math geeks, but I bet I could be better than high school students and probably better than the average math teacher right now (seriously, someof them are horrible), so going to school to get a teaching credential seems like a good non-medical option.

There are also some super extra backup options, like just going back to Japan and seeing if my old English teaching job is still available and whether I can just do that for the rest of my life.

I’m kind of curious if there are any obvious low-hanging fruit jobs around right now. People used to say that it was both easy and lucrative to become an actuary and they had relatively good working environment/status, but that loophole in the rat race seems to have closed up now. All the ones I know about now (Australian outback, etc) seem more like summer jobs for college students than lifetime careers. Are there any I’mmissing?

Right now, if I don’t get a job I think my plan is to stay in Berkeley until June, possibly studying just enough programming to see whether I have any aptitude for it. Then do some clinical rotations in Internal Medicine at any hospital that will take me over the summer to see if maybe the Internal Medicine people are mysteriously more favorably disposed to me than the Psychiatry people. Once the summer winds downand the hospitals kick me out for their normal set of med students, I could spend the autumn applying to, in order of desirability: Internal Medicine residencies if they seem mysteriously well disposed to me, medical externships (yearlong unpaid medical resume builders), law schools, MPH programs, MBA programs, and whoever trains teachers (note to self: look that up). Then wait until next March and take the best thing I get into. If I get intoliterally nothing, and I have aptitude for programming, go into that. Otherwise, move back to Japan (or Korea? or Arabia?) and teach English (or stick around and work for MetaMed if they’re successful) to earn enough money to subsist while I continue applying to things.

This is a bad plan. I do not like it. I really really hope I get a residency in this year’s Match.

Future Tense

Scott Alexander defends logical positivism, a philosophy often dismissed by many in the field. While he acknowledges its flaws, he argues that there is value in the idea that meaningful things can be divided into something resembling science and something resembling logic, with everything else being deemed meaningless. Alexander explores how this framework can be productive and useful in filtering out statements that lack meaning or need to be discarded. He also reflects on the potential limitations of the system, while admitting his own bias. Dive into this intriguing defense of logical positivism and challenge your own philosophical views.

As far as I know, there’s nothing everyone in philosophy agrees is right. But there are a few things that everyone in philosophy agrees are wrong. Right now I can think of two of them – Rene Descartes, and logical positivism.
Er, well, one of them. Because I kind of like logical positivism.
And before everyone yells at me, I understand this is sort of sketchy. I’m not saying that they were entirely right about anything, or that their criteria work exactly as stated. But it’s like – well, take those ancient philosophers who said everything was made out of atoms. In fact, they’re wrong. Light isn’t made out of atoms, mathematics isn’t made out of atoms, quarks aren’t made out of atoms, et cetera. But they were sure on to something, and I give them much more credit than philosophers who didn’t say everything was made out of atoms.
I am an inexact person, and I tend to think inexactly, and the fact that the logical positivists were working in an area that vaguely points to a cluster of correct things is good enough for me. Let me explain what I mean by “a cluster of correct things”.
In the 1700s, David Hume came up with an idea now called “Hume’s fork”, which Wikipedia describes like so:
Hume’s fork is an explanation of David Hume’s aggressive division between “relations of ideas” versus “matters of fact and real existence”. By Hume’s fork, relations among ideas are strictly divided from states of actuality.
(and before you ask, yes, Hume’s Fork is also a legendary artifact in Dungeons and Discourse)
Then in the 1900s the logical positivists came around; they get described as saying “that the truths of science are verifiable empirical claims and that the truths of logic and mathematics are tautologies. These two constitute the entire universe of meaningful judgements; anything else is nonsense.”
And in the 2010s, the latest Less Wrong Sequence, Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners tried to reduce meaningful statements to “two kinds of meaningfulness and two ways that sentences can refer; a way of comparing to physical things found by following pinned-down causal links, and logical validity by comparison to models pinned-down by axioms” as well as combinations between them. This is a really good sequence and I especially recommend Mixed Reference which says a lot of the stuff below only better (I did avoid re-reading it until I was done writing this, so as to keep my brain at least a little in original-idea-mode).
These three claims are somewhat different, but they all seem to have kind of the same idea. They all seem to be saying that we can divide meaningful things into something-kinda-like-science, and something-kinda-like-logic, and that everything else is meaningless. Their differences seem to be mostly how “something kinda-like-science” gets cashed out.
And while acknowledging the importance of figuring out exactly what “something kinda-like science” means, right now to me it seems less important than the overall observation that having even this vague sort of poorly-specified system is a whole lot better than not having any system of this sort at all.
More importantly, this idea is productive. I admit my assertion of its productivity is highly biased, in that by “productive” I mean “things I want to hear fall out of it”, but I do find this happening with gratifying frequency. Usually when this system red-flags a statement as “probably not meaningful”, on further investigation it very often does turn out to be something bad that needs to be thrown out. And when this isn’t the case, I usually gain a much more solid understanding of the statement by trying to see exactly how it reduces to one of these two kinds of meaning or a combination thereof.
It may be that there are some kinds of statements that are meaningful but just plain don’t work this way. I am having trouble thinking of them, but it’s normal to have trouble coming up with statements that disprove a theory you like, and I’m sure I will hear many attempts at them in the comments. But even if they exist, they seem to me much like the “light is not made of atoms” example above – correct, but irrelevant to the fact that atomic theory is really awesome and that if someone goes around saying “That particular horse there is not made of atoms, and no one can force me to say that it is,” they’re probably making a mistake.
As an example of “things that I do think yield to this positivist technique”, let me give some classic examples of things that people say don’t.
Start with mathematics. This one is easy. Mathematical systems are systems of axioms and theorems. These are logical tautologies. Some of these systems seem to describe our world pretty well. This is an empirical observation.
Move onto morality. A little harder. The definition of any moral system is a logical tautology; if I define “utilitarianism” as “act for the greatest good of the greatest number”, I have defined what is…not quite a formal system, but could probably be turned into one if someone were rigorous enough. My brain seems to exist in such a way that it reflectively endorses this system rather than another one. That’s an empirical observation. This isn’t quite what most people want out of morality, but I consider that a feature, not a bug; morality the way most people want it is probably meaningless.
An even harder one: “If Lincoln had kept McClellan as general, the South would have won the US Civil War.” Maybe this describes the output of the logical formal system corresponding to the universe (!) with certain inputs empirically determined by the state of Civil War-era America.(I bet there’s a better way to rescue this one, but I can’t think of it.)
[EDIT: Now that I am done writing this I am looking at the Mixed Reference post above, and it does a pretty good job]
Finally, we come to logical positivism itself, which was famously accused of failing its own criteria by Karl Popper. Once again, everyone agrees it’s possible to define logical positivism. And by analogy with math and morals, now we just need to show that this system, as defined, matches some property we want it to have.
And obviously this is going to be sort of subjective, because “property we want it to have” depends on what properties we want of our ontologies. It might even end up circular, because a lot of the properties I want my ontologies to have probably sound a little like “Doesn’t talk about meaningless stuff, with meaningless being defined as [something that uses a lot of the same criteria as logical positivism]”.
But I think it might also correspond closely to that which can be debated. That is, what is there such that, using reason rather than emotion or made-up pseudologic, we can actually change our minds about and correctly judge as having one probability of truth rather than another?
I welcome examples of this being proven totally false.

A defense of logical positivism (yes, really)

Slate Star Codex

The Anti-Reactionary FAQ

[REPOST] The Non-Libertarian FAQ

[ACC] How Much Significance Should We Ascribe To Spiritual Experiences?

Scott Alexander delves into the perplexing realm of reactionary philosophy, seeking to shed light on the controversial ideas that often seem morally repugnant or utterly ridiculous to the uninitiated. With humor and wit, he explores the mindset of reactionaries and attempts to unravel their complex beliefs. Alexander grapples with questions about the superiority of modern society, drawing parallels with historical civilizations and touching on sensitive issues such as race. Brace yourself for an intellectually stimulating read that challenges conventional wisdom and invites you to question the foundations of our own civilization.

Read Slate Star Codex

Choose Your Reading Path

Full Backlog

Best Hits

You'll start with:

YOU’RE PROBABLY WONDERING WHY I’VE CALLED YOU HERE TODAY

Abraham Lincoln, Ape-Man

Abraham Lincoln, Necromancer

About Slate Star Codex